NCIIP: Employment and Workforce

You are here

NCIIP: Employment and Workforce

The recently created White House Task Force on New Americans is charged with submitting a National Integration Plan to President Obama by March 20, 2015, offering recommendations for federal actions to further immigrant integration. Proposals made to the Task Force by MPI's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy and others to support immigrants' linguistic, economic, and civic integration are collected here.

Immigrant adults in the United States lag their native-born peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, with resulting effects on their income, employment, education, and health, according to MPI analysis of U.S. scores on the 2012 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The findings, which reveal wide ethnic and racial gaps in scoring, underscore deep U.S. social inequalities.

Want the latest estimates and characteristics of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, including their potential eligibility for deferred action? Use this innovative data tool to get population estimates and much more—including countries of origin, recency of arrival, educational enrollment and attainment, industries of employment, incomes, parental and marital status, and English proficiency—for unauthorized immigrants at the national level, by state, and for top counties. Click here to get started.

As many as 5.2 million unauthorized immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, as well as many brought to the United States as children, could gain relief under new and expanded deferred action programs announced in November 2014. For U.S. and state breakdowns on populations potentially eligible for relief from deportation, click here.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is unprecedented in the scope of its educational requirements. This report provides sociodemographic snapshots of three key DACA groups, explores the challenges to their educational success, and offers recommendations for educators and other stakeholders looking to support the educational attainment of these young unauthorized immigrants.

Fifty-five percent of the 1.2 million unauthorized immigrant youth immediately eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program launched in 2012 had applied as of July 20, 2014. This report provides the most up-to-date estimates available for the size, countries of origin, educational attainment, employment, English proficiency, age, gender, and poverty rates for the DACA population nationally and for key states, and is accompanied by a new data tool with national and state-level data.

Recent Activity

In this webinar, experts discuss barriers immigrant and LEP individuals face in accessing the WIA system, how a revitalized WIA could address these barriers, and the extent to which the current Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee's WIA reauthorization proposal addresses these barriers.

This interactive language access webinar, one in a series offered by the Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, examines how New York and Illinois have broken down some of these barriers to proactively engage LEP communities to obtain workforce services.

The United States has historically offered unparalleled economic opportunity to successive generations of immigrants and their children, poised to play an increasing role in the U.S. economy. But the lasting impact of job loss and slower growth over the next decade will translate into fewer opportunities for workers—and immigrants may prove the most vulnerable.

This report describes the range of policies available to improve immigrants’ economic integration through language acquisition, especially those focused on getting immigrants into jobs or moving into higher-paying jobs. It assesses promising models and practices from Europe and North America.

This important MPI report challenges the conventional wisdom about the immigrant workforce, using a sophisticated new method of analysis that permits deeper examination of how workers – immigrant and native-born – fare by economic sector, the skill level of their jobs, and educational attainment.

Despite conventional wisdom that the U.S. immigrant workforce is shaped like an hourglass—wide at the top and the bottom but narrow in the middle— in reality immigrants are more evenly dispersed across the skills spectrum. This report shows that the fastest growth in immigrant employment since 2000 has occurred in middle-skilled jobs.

Slightly more than 2.1 million unauthorized immigrant youth and young adults could be eligible to apply for legal status under the 2010 DREAM Act, though historical trends indicate that perhaps fewer than 40 percent would obtain legal status because of a variety of limitations. This policy brief offers detailed estimates of potential DREAM Act beneficiaries.

Pages

About the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy

As millions of baby-boom generation workers begin retiring, projections indicate that any net growth in the U.S. workforce over the next few decades will come from new immigrants. These immigrant workers and their children are expected to play a key role in helping the United States weather this historic reshaping of its workforce, and in meeting the soaring demands that will be placed on health and social support programs by the elderly over the next 30 years. Unlike many developed countries, in the United States immigrants are overrepresented in the labor market, making up 12-13 percent of the population, but 15-16 percent of the workforce.

Currently, the immigrant labor force has an hourglass shape, with large shares of immigrants at the top and bottom of the skill distribution. Yet the fastest growth in immigrant employment since 2000 has occurred in middle-skilled jobs: those requiring more than high school but less than a college degree.

Educational attainment, English proficiency, and the response of the current workforce system to the needs of immigrant workers represent key areas for foreign-born workers, as the research here examines.

Research also indicates that many mid- and high-skilled immigrants face serious difficulties in obtaining recognition for the education, credentials, and work experience they obtained before arriving in the United States. Employers and regulatory bodies often lack expertise in comparing education and skill certifications obtained outside the United States, leaving many skilled immigrants working in jobs that require lower skills than they possess.